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Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

adamcadre.ac

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Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#651

Post by sseagull »

Amezarak wrote: post #603
makeitdouble wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the same report, the bullet point above your first quote: > The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education. That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession. Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years…

> specialized profession. Color me skeptical that it's a specialized profession. It does not appear to me that decades of education majors have done any better than those who didn't possess such a degree, or that there are any special skills involved beyond knowing the subject and good interpersonal skills. When I think back to my best teachers, none of them had any special skills. They were just passionate. It doesn…

I believe teaching is a somewhat specialized profession, or at least a very separate skill from knowing the subject. I am just getting into teaching now, at a college level, and finding it is a completely different beast than everything else, even though I know the subject very well. I mean, we've all had teachers that sucked, or professors who cared more about research than teaching; it's not something that people can 'just do'.

> none of them had any special skills

Great teachers make it look easy. What you don't see is the preparation and the previous iterations of their ideas. It's like acting - good actors make it look like an easy profession. But try "acting naturally" in front of a camera sometime. For most people, even walking becomes awkward.

Or programming. Behind most great programmers is a trail of terrible code that they have written over the years.

>They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read.

There are quite a few people who can read, even at a high level. But how do you teach it, and teach it in a scalable way? It's not as easy as you think.

Also, what field doesn't have fashion and missteps? Doesn't HN regularly complain about how various programming paradigms and languages were terrible ideas? What makes you think that anyone can do something complex by going from zero to the best implementation in one iteration?

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#652

Post by kickout »

fakedang wrote: post #571
kickout wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is correct. double your salary at your job, but have to take verbal abuse and berated from your 'boss' and see how that paycheck affects your life

Investment bankers barely enjoy their jobs and take a lot of abuse from their bosses, yet there is no shortage of banker aspirants. Some even stay for the long haul, or go to even worse working conditions such as private equity, for more money.

Investment bankers also have autonomy and generally work in small teams. Not responsible for human beings, just capital. Also if a IB gets fired (but is good) they are probably employed within a week. A good teacher that gets fired (for fighting the bad administration? Good luck...

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#653

Post by hypnoscripto »

hutzlibu wrote: post #561
hypnoscripto wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my reply above. I didn’t think this idea would be controversial. Working conditions should improve when the workers have other options.

"Working conditions should improve when the workers have other options." So when the workers have not other options, working conditions can stay low?

It’s not a “should” it’s just what happens.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#654

Post by zzzzzzzza »

bombcar wrote: post #266
arkh wrote: post #115

> Colleagues from programs where these moves happened earlier have pointed out what the results have been: kids wind up with stellar grade point averages and glowing recommendations, get into top colleges, and… drop out after about three weeks, saying that they feel like they’re years behind everyone else and don’t know what’s going on, because they are and they don’t. There must a good way to describe this "school t…

Usurious student debt should be mandated at 0% interest and only paid back via a percentage of income. And such this would require it be issued by the state (as no company would want to) and you could tune it so that it would have to be paid back in 15 years (say) or be forgiven - and so offering it to people likely to end up in middling income jobs wouldn’t be worth while. And make it so that if it doesn’t get paid…

the more you extend debt financing for a given thing the more expensive something gets... mortgages or student debt. debt is where new money comes from in our financial system...

now the second part of your proposal, would be interesting. but in practice if you combine both parts probably they would extremely aggressively filter students

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#655

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

chongli wrote: post #644
kwhitefoot wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> take care of them It sounds like you want to just pay people to stay alive without helping them to gain the skills necessary to make that life worthwhile to themselves. Before we try to be efficient we need to agree on what we are being efficient about.

The wrinkle in this discussion is the inevitable march of technology. It’s simply a lot more difficult to make a valuable contribution to society today than it was a few decades ago. It takes a lot more education and specialized training to gain the skills that put oneself in demand. The idea that we can push water uphill, and bring the most struggling students up above an ever-rising bar, is becoming a controversial…

The logical conclusion of this thought process is a question of what to do with laggards and I do not see it being addressed. Ignoring it is not a real option.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#656

Post by giantg2 »

lostdog wrote: post #565
mlyle wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough, private schools can pay a fair bit less. At a private school, you get to avoid most of the disruption, have smaller class sizes, and teach brighter students on average. If you're passionate about what you're teaching, these are things you may value more than salary, so...

Private schools also have fewer hiring restrictions, which lets them lower salaries. I know a couple people who did not get the qualifications to work at a public school, and now teach at private schools. (Not for lack of ability, by the way).

Really? Our state generally just requires a state teaching certification and FBI background check. I thought that was also a requirement for K-12 private schools.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#657

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

mhuffman wrote: post #598
rcpt wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw

>heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw There is no good source on "this kind of thing"! This is a type of "Wicked Problem"[1] and also a political darling of every political group. And since every social scientist is just a person, with political, personal, and moral beliefs, any papers that they are willing to release typically reflect that. Further, any "peers" that review those…

True. I guess it is worth watching what people are doing regardless of their political beliefs. Have you noticed for example that in US people target specific locations for their kids? Hell, my wife was pushing hard to get a house in a 'good' district and we didn't even have kids yet. Social proof and all that, but there is a reason it exists to begin with.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#658

Post by candiodari »

throwaway210222 wrote: post #648
zozbot234 wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something like 30% of the school's budget is allocated to these "difficult kids". ... Much of that money and effort is simply wasted if teachers aren't going to adopt effective approaches towards teaching and helping these kids.

0% should be wasted on the incorrigible. And yes, they exist.

Even the incorrigible will perform (much) better given 1-on-1 instruction. Less kids per teacher yields better results.

The problem is that performance is exponential. That same 1-on-1 instruction will take a well performing kid to "surgeon".

It will take the incorrigible ... maybe ... to only quit school at 10th grade. Which does directly translate to money for the school these days.

What teachers/schools also effectively like about the incorrigible is that any (lowest wage) idiot that sticks to it will help the incorrigible. Not to surgeon levels, but better than before, sure. For obvious reasons you don't need much math. Some, yes, but not much. Whereas it takes a capable teacher to get good performers even higher.

Teachers are protecting the incompetent among them by doing this.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#659

Post by muyuu »

mindvirus wrote: post #647
zepto wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're tearing down a straw man friend, I didn't say anything about tutoring or homeschooling. No straw man involved. I don’t think you’ve thought through the implications of ‘getting rid of private school’. The point is that to ban private schools you’d also have to ban homeschooling.

I don't see how that follows. If you're making a slippery slope argument - the answer is that there is a difference between a private school with administration, dedicated real estate and staff teaching 100s of kids, and people keeping their kids home to teach them themselves. If it's a semantic argument, that homeschooling is a form of non-public and therefore private education, by private schools I specifically mea…

at best you'd move the threshold to remove yourself from the system a little higher, from those paying top dollar private schools to those who can hire tutors and/or have one of the parents dedicated to tutoring

there's no effective way to ban private tutoring in the sense and effect of this thread that doesn't also involve banning homeschooling

edit: or simply send the kids abroad, the classic rich-person-in-failed-society way

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#660

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

dbt00 wrote: post #549
throwaway894345 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet for some reason in the US this is a political hot button, which doesn’t make any sense to me. I share in your bafflement. Charitably, perhaps they reason that parents will pick schools that are worse on average than public schools, but I suspect it is more of a “equality demands poor schooling regardless of class” with a side of “the state gets to determine the values your child is taught”.

The problem isn't what school the parents pick, it's that the voucher schools cherry pick high scoring kids to hold up stats and aren't accountable to the state for the education the state is paying for.

But isn't it a good thing where birds of feather flock together? Just not being dragged down from low scoring kids is worth it. Why can't they select for criteria they are looking for?
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